The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Legacy input-queued switches may experience performance problems due to head-of-line (HOL) blocking. HOL blocking may refer to a situation wherein a packet at the head of a queue (head packet) is unable to be serviced due to a conflict related to one or more resources of the switch. Because the packet is unable to be serviced, the packet may not be transferred out of the queue. As a result, the packet may block other subsequent packets in the same queue, and may prevent service of the subsequent packets behind it in the queue, even if those subsequent packets do not have a similar resource conflict.